United3dArtists Archive

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 25 Feb 2011, 15:55

I started the animation portion of the FBX importer. I think it's going to work out. The SDK doesn't seem to like setting keyframes for hierarchy objects or skeletal structures, so I imported as parenting structures instead. I'll use script to transfer the animations after the binary import step. It's the same approach I had to take with the Unreal PSA importer except for that one I used a temporary text file to hold the intermediate animation values. The attached zip file contains a wmv sample animation of a climbing motion I got from the 3DBuzz MMO class.

tylerzambori · Post by **tylerzambori** » 25 Feb 2011, 17:41

Yay Clintonman!

froo · Post by **froo** » 25 Feb 2011, 17:45

Kick Ass Clinton!

Benji · Post by **Benji** » 26 Feb 2011, 12:51

Nice.....

Steinie · Post by **Steinie** » 26 Feb 2011, 14:21

Boy I hope this works, this would be awesome if I could use trueSpace with Messiah for animation.

RAYMAN · Post by **RAYMAN** » 26 Feb 2011, 14:49

Steinie wrote:Boy I hope this works, this would be awesome if I could use trueSpace with Messiah for animation.

In fact it would be even more awsome then you think .. because you could use Messiah with Truespace and Vue...........
You could export to truespace via FBX and to Vue via Collada......you could even use anything from Animeeple over Daz studio to Motion builder......
Here is an animation i did in a few minutes with Animeeple and exported to Vue and rendered inside Vue......
remember if you dont use Vray or yafaray your stuck inside Truespace with realtime renderer...
Peter

Steinie · Post by **Steinie** » 26 Feb 2011, 16:54

RAYMAN wrote: You could export to truespace via FBX and to Vue via Collada......you could even use anything from Animeeple over Daz studio to Motion builder......
Here is an animation i did in a few minutes with Animeeple and exported to Vue and rendered inside Vue......
remember if you dont use Vray or yafaray your stuck inside Truespace with realtime renderer...
Peter

That is where Stan's new "Stan-alone VRay" comes in!

RAYMAN · Post by **RAYMAN** » 26 Feb 2011, 17:01

Steinie wrote:
RAYMAN wrote: You could export to truespace via FBX and to Vue via Collada......you could even use anything from Animeeple over Daz studio to Motion builder......
Here is an animation i did in a few minutes with Animeeple and exported to Vue and rendered inside Vue......
remember if you dont use Vray or yafaray your stuck inside Truespace with realtime renderer...
Peter
That is where Stan's new "Stan-alone VRay" comes in!

Well lets see how well that handles batches....the batchprocessing for Kerky and Thea werent that easy from what I gathered from the forums.....

stan · Post by **stan** » 26 Feb 2011, 17:22

I'm still trying to understand how animation is done in vray..at the moment you would have to move a object or bone by keyframe and press render again, saving as a numbered image..lol..

RAYMAN · Post by **RAYMAN** » 26 Feb 2011, 17:30

stan wrote:I'm still trying to understand how animation is done in vray..at the moment you would have to move a object or bone by keyframe and press render again, saving as a numbered image..lol..

I guess that the exporter for the standalone version will be able to render batches of frames......
there are other problems to consider too like flicker...... years and years Vue had difficulty with that in the very fine detail of plants......
no animation support isnt just exporting frame by frame......from animations inside Ts workspace......
both fbx and collada exporters are godsent sometimes....
Peter

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 26 Feb 2011, 17:51

I posted an update last night but it didn't take so here's try number 2. I tried using the SDK to take care of skinning but it didn't turn out well. This is the result even before reading the skin from the fbx file.

So I'm going with plan B which is to save the skin info to a text file and use scripting to do it. This is the approach I took with the PSK importer. Last night I finished the research on how to read the skin from the fbx file. After that gets coded I start the scripts for the final skinning, transferring the animation to the actor and converting heirarchy objects from parenting form to tS grouping form.

Benji · Post by **Benji** » 27 Feb 2011, 05:11

While this is OT, another way to potentially get animations into TS could be through the "save morph sequence" feature. This saves out animations as a series of objects. These could, perhaps, be imported into TS the way blender fluids are with Froo's script.....I'm not sure if these could be imported via FBX or any other method.

Anyway, just a thought.....

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 27 Feb 2011, 07:22

Benji wrote:While this is OT, another way to potentially get animations into TS could be through the "save morph sequence" feature. This saves out animations as a series of objects. These could, perhaps, be imported into TS the way blender fluids are with Froo's script.....I'm not sure if these could be imported via FBX or any other method.

Anyway, just a thought.....

Not off topic at all. FBX supports morph targets and vertex animations. I do plan to take a look at Froo's plugin to see how he did it. I'll more likely look into the MDD file format for vertex animations. It's kind of a standard and it's supposed to be very straight forward to use. The only thing is workspace completely lacks vertex animation support, so we'll see what I can learn from Froo.

I got a lot of coding done today. The intermediate skinning text file looks good and I have started the script to copy animations and skinning. Overall, it's looking pretty good.

RAYMAN · Post by **RAYMAN** » 27 Feb 2011, 15:40

clintonman wrote:
Benji wrote:While this is OT, another way to potentially get animations into TS could be through the "save morph sequence" feature. This saves out animations as a series of objects. These could, perhaps, be imported into TS the way blender fluids are with Froo's script.....I'm not sure if these could be imported via FBX or any other method.

Anyway, just a thought.....
Not off topic at all. FBX supports morph targets and vertex animations. I do plan to take a look at Froo's plugin to see how he did it. I'll more likely look into the MDD file format for vertex animations. It's kind of a standard and it's supposed to be very straight forward to use. The only thing is workspace completely lacks vertex animation support, so we'll see what I can learn from Froo.

I got a lot of coding done today. The intermediate skinning text file looks good and I have started the script to copy animations and skinning. Overall, it's looking pretty good.

I said a few days ago that opening that chapter is like opening a can of worms........
All applications out there have a different implementaion of these animation capable formats ..worst of all .. is the Collada format world where you find most problems
from one application to the other......
This importer and exporter needs a lot of testing with different applications.....

if it works well with next to about anything out there that exports fbx then truespace can become a secret swiss knife for conversions...
You guys dont know how many crashes a had with the Alias fbx converted files...
Peter

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 27 Feb 2011, 17:29

The animation transfer to the joints is matching up now. Next up is skinning.

: fbxTestB_00583.jpg (8.62 KiB) Viewed 4890 times

Attached shows same animation as before applied to the skeleton.

Benji · Post by **Benji** » 27 Feb 2011, 22:14

Wow, you've made a lot of progress. Cool.

As for Collada, I think it's fair to say that it's going nowhere fast. It showed promise, but there was never much lust for it in the commercial world (i.e Austodesk users), and this has pretty much killed it as an animation format.

FBX seems to be the king now, everybody seems to support it.

RAYMAN · Post by **RAYMAN** » 27 Feb 2011, 23:39

Benji wrote:Wow, you've made a lot of progress. Cool.

As for Collada, I think it's fair to say that it's going nowhere fast. It showed promise, but there was never much lust for it in the commercial world (i.e Austodesk users), and this has pretty much killed it as an animation format.

FBX seems to be the king now, everybody seems to support it.

Yeah well the market does things doesnt it !
But for all of you interested in using the fbx file from Truespace now..... the fbx transformer that comes free from Alias does a good job for transforming
Collada files from animations inside Truespce to ie Carrara pro that most of you got from coverdiscs.....
Its importing animations or rigs thats the big problem for now....
Here is the truespace horse with animation (mocap) exported from TS with Collada and transformed with the alias complier and imported into
a Carrara 7.2 demo scene....

Benji · Post by **Benji** » 28 Feb 2011, 00:11

Yes, the fbx converter apparently does a better job than the official Collada plugins for 3dsmax as well. I still think fbx is the way forward, but in 3d "whatever works" is the credo most we must live by .......

RAYMAN · Post by **RAYMAN** » 28 Feb 2011, 01:06

sometimes everything works like exporting physics but the animations of your skeletons go wak.... see this example of tankgirl pushing the
cube and the spheres falling..

clintonman · Post by **clintonman** » 28 Feb 2011, 06:07

Almost done. The skinning is working now. The character/animation is mirrored. Left is right and right is left, but it's looking good. I also have a vertex normals problem so I need to do some autofaceting on the mesh. I manually cleaned it up for this shot. The original file also used photoshop files for the textures so I converted to jpg's and manually fixed the materials inside truespace. I forgot to mention that the animation is from a portion of an fbx file supplied by 3DBuzz to their member sponsors. It's the model they are using while developing a 3rd person camera system for Unity.

See latest video attached.

United3dArtists Archive

FBX Progress

FBX Progress

Re: FBX Progress

Re: FBX Progress

Re: FBX Progress

Re: FBX Progress

Re: FBX Progress

Re: FBX Progress

Re: FBX Progress

Re: FBX Progress

Re: FBX Progress

Re: FBX Progress

Re: FBX Progress

Re: FBX Progress

Re: FBX Progress

Re: FBX Progress

Re: FBX Progress

Re: FBX Progress

Re: FBX Progress

Re: FBX Progress

Re: FBX Progress